The Europe Problem?

[mattycub]

I have an old friend, someone I've known for most of my life, that's a die hard conservative and whom I occasionally spar with about political topics. I would say he's much more thoughtful than most of the morons that speak for conservatismtoday - he actually makes good faith arguments that warrant discussion, even if we disagree on a fundamental

Comments

[fj]

Any writer that talks about 'Europe' as a collective is just not paying attention.

Meanwhile, they pay fortunes here to celebrate sports greatness, and most of Europe has had enough wars to realize they don't want to get mixed up in ones that are not their own.

After 13 years I had to flee the idiocy of the US concept of greatness.

[chris_gardner]

Really? Did you have to FLEE our idiocy? Or did you just find that when the well of money dried up for you that you could use it as an excuse to leave?

[fj]

No, I fled. I had been looking to leave since 2004 but couldn't find a job on the other end, and in 2006 when my job ended I was really ready to go but I got an offer in LA and tried it against a strong pull to go back home. Winter 2007 I looked around after that whole thing did not work out and realized that for my sanity I should not want to stick around for an election year again and that I had had enough. So jeopardizing my greencard, with an unsold piece of real estate in a tanking market, and with no job on the other end, I pretty much packed my bags and sold my car in three weeks or so and got on a plane. It was more than a little hasty. Yes, I fled what I could not longer stand of the US environment. I should have waited and wrapped things up properly, but I couldn't.

And don't worry too much that I got it better by getting out: I landed in the UK. Financially it has been a disaster.

[ericdabear]

I'd be interested to know what the author's definition of "greatness" is because quite honestly it sounds about right to me. (Although I do enjoy my job and the field I'm in. My hope is to further combine my hobby/passion with my work environment.)

[dr_tectonic]

I think he sort of has a point, but in focusing on that he's missing a much bigger point.

If you're philosophizing towards a non-religious theory of general morality (i.e., having determined that "God said so" is a lousy starting point, and you'd be better off working from something like the golden rule), I think you have to consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And what I've concluded is that things that are good move people upward on the hierarchy, and things that are bad push them down. So our goal as civilized people should be to try and move as many people as far up as possible. You can define Good in those terms and have it be in accord with our moral instincts and feelings about right and wrong without any appeal to divine authority. I think your conservative friend would even be comfortable with that definition in that moving up in the hierarchy is a direction that tends towards what he would characterize as 'greatness

[fj]

Careful with Maslow: the experience in concentration camps shows that people will quite willingly still make art while they do not have food and shelter. In fact, sometimes they will make art because of it.

[popebuck1]

But conversely, the "conservative friend's" argument would seem to be that we shouldn't have closed the concentration camps, because the harshness of living there inspired such lovely artwork from a handful of people.

[dr_tectonic]

You do have to be careful, but I think what that datum shows is that people behave differently under severe constraint than they do when allowed to act freely.

If denied food, people can still make art.

But given a choice between spending their paycheck on groceries and spending their paycheck on art supplies, very few people will actually choose starving to death in a garrett next to a stack of completed paintings. Mostly they'll just be unhappy supermarket clerks who wish they could afford to paint more often.

[popebuck1]

Except that all those things (the boredom, detachment, lack of motivation, etc.) that apply to those European masses who are recklessly having their needs met, apply in equal measure to American elites who are "comfortable." How many vice presidents and CEOs think of their paper-shuffling or boardroom careers as "noble labor" as opposed to their career, the time they put in so they can have the second house or the vacations in Maui? The "nobility of honest toil" always seems to be something the upper class expects for the lower classes, not for themselves.

The difference being, in the welfare states of Europe, the idea is to push more of the population up to that level, where they don't have to scrape along by the skin of their teeth and focus on food and shelter.

In other words - just what dr_tectonic said.

[lostncove]

To make this somehow Europe's problem, when every other post I see is about obsession with the most minute trivium possible, seems rather pot-and-kettle-ish. Americans have just as much of a problem with subsituting "bigger and better" with living the examined life.